7 Highly Effective Social Media Campaigns from Last Year You Can Learn From

There are more than 4 billion internet users and almost 3.2 billion of them actively use social media. This makes social media a great platform for brands to attract new customers, promote their products and build a long-term relationship with fans and followers. That is why many brands are turning their attention to social media and increasing the budgets for social media.

Last year, social media marketers tried to be more creative and gave us some exceptional social media marketing campaigns that we can learn from and drive our social media marketing campaigns to success in 2018. In this article, you will learn about great lessons from successful social media campaigns.

1. KFC: 11 Herbs and Spices

Whether you are a fan of KFC’s iconic fried chicken or not, you must admire the creativity KFC showed in its social media marketing campaign. In September 2017, KFC started following 11 people on twitter, 5 girls named Spice and 6 dudes named Herb. That is where the campaign got its name.

Mike Edgette, a social media manager for TallGrass Public Relations, managed to grasp the idea and tweeted about it. His tweet went viral and received thousands of retweets and likes. This also send a barrage of twitter followers to KFC twitter account and the activity soared to all time high. KFC returned the favor by painting the picture of Edgette riding on Colonel Sander’s back with a chicken drumstick. The picture was again retweeted by Edgette and that tweet also generated thousands of retweets, and the cycle continues.

2. General Electric: Balance The Equation Campaign

General Electric picked up one of the hottest topic gender disparity at workplace and weaved their social media campaign around. It all started back in February 2017, when GE announced that it will hire 20,000 females to fill in STEM roles by 2020. This would make it largest tech company in US to achieve 50-50 male to female ratio, a feat no company have managed to achieve in the past.

This gave rise to balance the equation campaign. To attract millennial to their social media marketing campaigns, Millie Dresselhaus was choosen as the face of the campaign. Her face was everywhere from magazine covers to billboards. The campaign becomes a success with balance the equation hashtag getting a massive response. GE-girls.com website also delivered the same results.

3. Spotify’s New Year’s Resolution

Spotify started the year with a bang with its new year’s resolution social media campaign. It made New Year’s resolution fun for everyone by compiling some of the most humorous user data and turned it into New Year’s resolution. It took help from more than 70 artists to put together more than hundred billboards. They took it to social media and got amazing response.

4. AirBnB: We Are Here

How is it like to be stuck in a long queue? Frustrating is not it. AirBnB feel your pain and put together a social media campaign. Their vision was a world without queues. AirBnB launched a new mobile app in November 2017 that let users share their real life experiences hosted by real people in the community. The purpose was to build a strong, emotional human connection with this app and it managed to pull crowds in six different cities to promote its trip feature.

5. McDonald’s Bling Mac Social Media Contest

Most people who have ever been to McDonald’s knows about Big Mac but how many of them are aware of Bling Mac? Very few, right. What is Bling Mac? It is an innovative campaign idea by McDonald in which Big Mac fans can get an opportunity to win 18-karat jewelry in the visage of Hamburger. People who are interested in winning will only have to tweet Valentine’s love to McDonald along with the hashtag #BlingMacContest.

6. Cisco Champions

The networking giant Cisco systems betted big on influencer marketing campaigns but went on to introduce a new program called Cisco Champion. The program offered incentives for IT experts. Cisco harnessed the power of user generated content and advocacy by giving back to people who use their networking platforms. From access to new products to providing free education, it caught up with Cisco users and they shared their stories, which went viral on social media. The number of social media mentions and retweets speaks volumes about its success.

7. Wix: Melt the Ice

Wix, the popular website building platform made headlines early in the year with its Melt the Ice campaign. Wix managed to secure a prime-time slot during Super Bowl and offered $10,000 every weekday. On game day, they gave away $50,000. Wix used Facebook Live and showed a football helmet submerged in ice. The names of the lucky winners were done when the ice melted completely and helmet came out of it. Hundreds of people changed their profile picture to Chez Felix, who was the focal point of the Wix social media campaign.

Which is your most successful social media campaign and what did you do differently? Feel free to share your experiences with us in the comments section below.

Author Bio

Irfan Ak is a digital marketing manager at Branex – a design company & a guest blogger on various websites. He is also the digital strategist of Taskque, a free task management software. He is also has worked with various other brands and created value for them.